Synthetic fibers, such as carbon fiber or glass fiber, are applied to produce increasingly larger parts and in larger amounts. This requires adapting the productivity of the taping machines.
To that end, machines have been developed with applicator heads for simultaneously applying multiple fiber strips, and reducing the time for manufacturing the parts, thus solving the condition of a low application speed.
The increase of the performance of the applicator heads for applying the fiber strips has made certain aspects, such as the fiber strip feed system, acquire a main role in the overall performance of taping machines due to the following reasons:                Upon eliminating the main bottleneck of taping machines, which was the capacity of dispensing the material to be applied, there are other factors which have now become productivity limiting factors, such as the downtimes necessary for reloading the tape reels as they run out.        The high productivity generally requires high speeds, accelerations and dynamics in the supply of the fiber strips, such that the feed must be able to supply the material in the conditions and at the pace required by the applicator head, while maintaining the control of the tension required in the application.        Since the optimal productivity is sought for each application, the width of the application web is large in many cases, which requires design criteria and precautions stricter than those usually used for handling narrower webs.        
Up until now, the feed reels in the heads of machines for applying fiber strips were replaced by stopping the machine, manually splicing the strip of the finished reel to the strip of the new feed reel, since there were no automatic splicers in this field of synthetic fibers.
However, in a high performance machine it may be necessary to change the reels every five or ten minutes. Each reel change is done by a manual process and results in machine downtime. Such idle time considerably limit the productivity of the machines.